By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

The lure of the South Seas is alive and well in the form of a 6-foot, full-bearded Austrian artist, video photographer and Pacific adventurer who is filming native artists of Hawai'i for TV stations in Vienna and Berlin.

He's Ferdinand Karl, who belongs on the deck of a voyaging canoe.

Karl travels the Pacific to bring the South Seas to Europe. He spent four months on tiny Satawal in Micronesia, the home of Hokule'a master navigator Mau Piailug, to film voyaging. I got acquainted with him on Ailinglaplap Atoll in the Marshal Islands where we covered a sailing canoe race and slept under the palm trees.

He has a wide European audience for his documentaries. His latest idea is to explore the dimensions of Polynesian art. "Why do you want to do that?" I asked him.

"I'm an artist," he said. But he took the long way around to the Pacific.

His father, a test pilot, wanted him to be an engineer. Karl hated engineering courses. Since age 6, he'd played the guitar. By age 10 he'd worked up to Bach. Then he took piano lessons to learn how to compose music.

When his father died he took up painting because the colors reminded him of tones in music. Photography had always been a hobby.

"People have tunnel vision in Austria," he said. "If you do things differently, you don't get along. For years, my mother was ashamed to tell anyone that I was a painter even through I sold my work."

Just before his grandmother died, she told him he had relatives in Vancouver, British Columbia. So he escaped Vienna and went to Canada, where it was too cold. Hawai'i's warmth beckoned. Karl stayed at the Nakamura Hotel. He did three or four paintings and took photos.

By 1978 he was back in Vienna, lecturing, selling his Hawai'i paintings and working on the side with a plumber.

Money saved from selling his art got him back to the Pacific where he read a National Geographic magazine that featured Hokule'a.

Two years later he was in Satawal, sailing with an 80-year-old navigator. On the island, Karl collected stories that mothers told their children at bedtime. Back in Vienna, he turned his stories and photos into a book, collaborating with a German ethnologist. The book became a springboard. A TV station wanted moving pictures. They gave him a video camera.

Karl set out again and did a documentary on Micronesia that showed in Vienna and Berlin, and also a book. He did a documentary on artists of Vienna. Why not artists of the Pacific? So here he is, racing around on his bicycle.

"Taking photos is another way of looking at something," he said. "It is the same for music and painting. All three for me are means of expression from different points of view."

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.